Welcome to the course blog. The way it works is this: I find interesting stories in newspapers, include links and provide comments. Then I talk about it at the beginning of the class.
You read the blog, preferably before class, in any case before exams, and
1. get interested in economics
2. read business sections and learn to understand what appears in good publications
3. learn to think critically and evaluate what you read, as there are serious errors even in the best papers, and errors are common in other publications
4. learn more economics
5. do well on exams.
About the last point: about 5%-10% of each exam will be based on blog entries. As there will be many entries I will let you know before exam which entries you can skip. The questions will be based on the comments to the articles and they will be easy to someone who read them, and difficult to figure out for someone who has not. In other words, low hanging fruit.
As classes are in the afternoon, I will read the morning papers and most of the blog will be based on what appeared that day. This means that the blog will not be synchronized with the course. I think current events are more interesting when they happen as we speak. For example the first entry deals with monetary policy which we will cover in November. If we waited till November, it would be old news.
Important There are two issues with newspaper articles: availability and permanency.
1. Availability. I will do my best to find articles in free sources. But with the paywall introduced by more and more publications, that is not always possible. The way to go around it is to use the possibility, provided by most sources, to read a fixed number of articles a year for free. If the limit is 10 and you use four browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE) this is now 40 articles per computer. It is possible that some publications are available at university's computers. If you run into problems please let me know.
2. Permanency. Articles sometimes disappear from the web, especially for news agencies like AP, CP, Bloomberg, Reuters, which I will use since they provide free access. Also, news agencies often update the articles. The only way to avoid problems is to read the blog as early as possible or download the articles right away.
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